Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Gad-ahful Telephone Surveys...

"It'll only take a few minutes of your time,"--Telephone Survey People

I hate telephone surveys and I'll tell you why. I am not a statistic. That's about the whole of it. Sure, telephone surveys could have practical use and application, but I personally spend too much of my time carefully crafting my opinions into sentences to spend any of my time trying to conform my generally imperfectly catagorizable opinions into neat, multiple choice answers to PC, vague, gender neutered questions. My instinctual answers to questions like, "Out of one to ten, one being least interested, ten being most interested, what is your interest level in cheese?" is invariably, "I like strong Irish chedder better than weak mozzerella...except when it comes to lasagna, in which case ricotta-parmesian balance is more important for flavor, and glucosity is key in choosing mozzerella. But as far as cheese by itself, Irish chedder."

Then they pause, and say, "So...is that maybe a six?"

The surveys always continue on that vein. The questions tend to be too vague, mostly. If they say, "How strongly do you feel about raising taxes? Strongly, medium strong, medium medium, medium weak, or loser-ass wobbly-chin?" My answer is, "Weh-hell, my boy, I do hate paying taxes. But where is this money going? Public transportation? Higher education? Hydrogen fuel research? The space program?" To which he replies, "...Is that a loser-ass wobbly-chin?"

There should just always be the option to answer all survey questions with an essay. A, B, C, D, or Essay. I might be happy then.

I have unstatistical opinions. That's really most of it, I think. I'm not educated enough to simply say yes or no to educated questions, and I'm too skeptical to even think that I'm being asked educated questions, and I'm too curious to shut down the thinking bits of my head and just answer the questions I hear as stated.